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up the file she’d reviewed last. “The idea that this perp was able to get his hands on each child without obvious breaking and entering, without confrontation, and without anyone seeing him makes me believe he’s a familiar.”
    Harper joined her on the floor. Jess resisted the urge to grin at how totally uncomfortable he looked sitting there in that suit with one leg curled under him and the other bent for an arm prop. “None of the families are connected—at least not in any way that was discovered inprevious investigations. Different neighborhoods, schools, churches. Nothing in common at all was found.”
    “The investigative work was relatively thorough.” She couldn’t deny Black and his predecessor had done a pretty damned good job. “But there will be something, Sergeant. We just haven’t found it yet.”
    “Like the girls, Andrea and the others, who were abducted by the Murphys?”
    That was the case that had brought Jess back to Alabama—back to Dan. “Yes, exactly like that. This unknown perp saw these children somewhere. Watched them. Maybe even interacted with them. Typically, a hunter has a preferred territory—a comfort zone. The Man in the Moon will have had a place he felt confident doing his hunting. That’s the connection. All we have to do is find it.”
    “Before September nineteenth,” he suggested.
    “Preferably.” If his past record was any indication, once he’d taken the child there was little hope of stopping him or saving the child. Then again, they had only one set of remains. There was no way to be certain what had become of the other children. So far the remains, presumed to be Dorie Myers, had told them nothing as to manner of death. However the little girl died, she hadn’t suffered any broken bones. Still, there was a whole array of other ways to die that included tremendous suffering.
    Not to mention the fear the child must have felt.
    Jess shuddered inside.
    She felt bad for Dan that he’d had to face those parents only to tell them basically nothing. And then to do the same in the press conference. But it was the truth. They had nothing, and until those remains were officiallyidentified there was nothing to tell other than that some freak had decided to play with the department’s newest deputy chief.
    Sucked to be popular.
    “Why reach out to you, Chief?” Harper thumbed through a file. “After all these years of silence, why now? Why you?”
    She considered his questions. They’d talked about this in the briefing, but Harper wanted her gut instinct. Problem was, she didn’t have much of one yet.
    Jess hunched her shoulders, let them drop. “I wish I could answer those questions, but I don’t have enough information to create an accurate assessment. Burnett could be right in that the perp is ill and wants to be caught. Sometimes they want someone to stop them but this guy appears to have stopped himself. The one thing I can say with real accuracy at this point is that there’s been some sort of change, more than once, in his life. First, there was a major change that prompted him to stop killing, assuming he has. Something else has occurred more recently to prompt his coming out like this.”
    “Maybe he was in prison? Or maybe he lived somewhere else for a while.”
    “Prison is a possibility,” Jess agreed. “But if he lived somewhere else and continued his same pattern of abductions, we’d likely know about it. There’d be something in one database or another.”
    “Yeah, I did a search on similar cases,” Harper said, sounding as dejected as Jess felt. “I didn’t find anything relevant.”
    “Changing an MO isn’t entirely unheard of.” But Jess knew the stats. “It’s highly unlikely unless there’sa compelling reason. An injury or abrupt change in circumstances can put a killer off his game. Sometimes the change is calculated, more often it’s not.”
    “So he didn’t go anywhere, he just went dormant for some reason,” Harper